


Don't Look Back In Anger

by Kariki



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Carl wasn't always such a good dad, Daddy Issues, Drug Use, I love this little trash boi and you will too damn it, M/M, anger issues, cobbled together headcanons, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 09:58:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15458838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kariki/pseuds/Kariki
Summary: A collection of headcanons/thoughts concerning Leo Manfred, written in crappy Fic form.





	Don't Look Back In Anger

When Leo was 6, he realized his family wasn’t like other families. Sure, there were plenty of kids with only one parent, but most of them actually knew the other parent, had spoken to them in some way. If not, it was because that parent had died.

When he realized this, he asked his mother what happened to his father. She looked sad and worried for a moment before smiling, kissing his forehead, and telling him his father is alive but he’s very, very busy. Leo frowned and asked when he was coming home then. She just hugged him and told him “Maybe once he’s not so busy, he’ll come and visit.”

When Leo was 12, he learned that the name ‘Manfred’ was a curse, at least as far as he was concerned. Being the son of a famous artist, people seemed to expect Leo to have the same ability. In truth, the only painting he had ever done was pouring acrylic with his mother – pour paint in a cup and dump it on a canvas, swoosh it around. It hardly required any skill at all... it was also very obviously not what was expected of him.

His middle school art teacher, Mr. Sanderson, seemed to believe that if he just pushed Leo hard enough he could reveal some hidden, secret talent and be the mentor to the next great painter...

When Leo spray painted twenty or so dicks onto the man’s car, he had not been impressed, not even by ‘Manfred’ written over the hood just under Leo’s name. It wasn’t the Manfred original he had been wanting.

When Leo was 15 he already had an impressive reputation as a juvenile delinquent. He knew it worried his mother, his behavior, but she also understood. She had given up on trying to get his father to so much as send a birthday card along with his child support payments. She tried to get him to express his anger in creative, safe ways but the world of art was a place of pain, rejection, and disappointment – Leo wanted no part of it.

When he kissed Leroy Blackwell in the back of that club and willingly swallowed the pill the older boy had pushed into his mouth, everything just... faded away. Something that might have been happiness came over him and that was more addicting than anything else.

When Leo was 16, his mother was dying. Brain cancer, discovered too late to do anything about. He had already started doing Red Ice but he kept it from her and, even when sitting by her hospital bed, skin crawling with want of a hit, he stayed.

When he first met his father, it was over his mother’s pale, too thin body. The man wouldn’t look at him for too long, would speak to his forehead instead of looking into his eyes.

Leo hated him. He wasn’t sure he ever hated anyone so much in all of his life.

When his mother died and Carl came to collect him, to ‘take care of him’, Leo said he wanted to be alone to pack some things. Once alone in his bedroom, Leo packed a bag, opened his bedroom window, and ran away.

It only lasted two weeks before police brought him to the Manfred estate, filthy and trembling with want of another hit.

With cold eyes, Carl let him in.

When Leo was 23, Carl was hit by a car.

Their relationship was still strained, but they both tried to put in the minimum effort – Leo only asked for money twice a month to pay for ‘expenses’ that used to include college, therapy, and rent but now mostly involved drugs. Carl, for his part, tried to accept his son for his faults, tried to steer him toward a better life... but neither could quite let go of their disappointment in each other.

When Carl was in the hospital, Leo quit the drugs and tried to be a better son. He had almost lost his father, after all, and maybe they could put the past behind them...

But this time, it was Carl who wasn’t willing to listen. He knew he would never walk again and the world had lost its shine and nothing he did could bring it back. He knew Leo was trying but all he could see was the shaking in the young man’s hands, guarded distance in his eyes, and features of a woman he didn’t love but had been a fun distraction...

Carl hated Leo in those years, almost as much as he hated himself.

When Leo was 27, he saw his father was capable of love. The android had been with his father for a year and, during that time, Carl had started to open up once again. He smiled more, would go out more – even to the parties he hated going to, he even started to paint again.

Leo saw it immediately, the look in the man’s eyes as he looked at that machine... like he was looking at his child.

It made him feel sick, made his skin crawl with want, his brain scream for relief of red smoke and numbness.

He thought he could never hate anyone as much as he hated Carl... now, he knew better.

When Leo was 28, his father died. He hadn’t expected it to hurt as much as it did. There was anger there still, disappointment, but also grief and a sense of being cheated out of something. He never told Carl about the kids in elementary school asking who his father was, he never told him about Mr. Sanderson’s car, or about Leroy, or how the world stopped at the same time as his mother’s heart. He never told him how worthless he had felt for so long and he wasn’t sure if it was Carl’s fault or his own for having the gall to hope for something more.

Carl’s grave was a black slab in the white snow, hard to miss but, he knew, it could have been far more pretentious given how other famous artists graves tended to go.

He stood over the grave, not sure if he wanted to cry or scream obscenities.

The android beside him said nothing, just stared at the black stone, tears in his eyes.

When Leo walked to the other side of the cemetery to visit his mother, Markus followed. Leo didn’t tell him to go away.

At his mother’s grave – a simple, small, headstone with her name written across it – he sat down in the snow and just stared and cried.

As the sun started to set, Leo and the android left the graveyard together, both done mourning their respective parents for the day. Their relationship was rocky, to say the least, but they tried to make an effort. They both knew they had to let go of their anger – at each other and at the world – before it could destroy them further.


End file.
